Increasingly enterprises are attempting to utilize existing technology to conduct business and affairs in a remote and more automated manner. For example, enterprises are now capable of deploying software services to remote facilities or customers over the Internet.
Moreover, with the capabilities of current technology enterprises can deploy several logical machines, each with their own independent processing environments, to one machine architecture. This concept is referred to as virtualization achieved via virtual machines (VM's) that are superimposed on an underlying physical architecture of a single machine.
In fact, VM's are becoming more and more common in the industry. One problem with VM's is the manner in which the VM operating systems (OS's) interact with the physical hardware of the machine on which they are deployed. Each VM has access to the physical machine's hardware. This includes memory, processor(s), hard drive(s), network card(s), and/or any other device physically located on the physical machine having a VM layered thereon. So, each VM OS installed on a VM has access to the physical hardware via that VM OS's VM.
Potentially, a hacker could use the VM's to further his/her own malicious ends. The hacker community is just now starting to discuss and investigate how to hack into VM's. Suppose a hacker gained access to a VM OS, the OS controls the ability to create new VM OS's. So, a hacker could create and spawn an additional OS that just the hacker was aware of. Once that is done, the hacker could use the OS to gain access to the underlying physical hardware of the VM, which includes memory, processor(s), hard drive(s), network card(s), etc. Additionally, the hacker could use the machine to attack other machines on the network and potentially have root access that would let the VM run undetected on the physical hardware with potentially scary consequences for the enterprise.
Thus, what is needed is a mechanism for improved VM authentication.